Continuous Improvement

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Focus on the Important Issues, Not the Many Issues

Utilizing the Pareto Method to Prioritize Improvement Activities

There is limited time, money or resources in every maintenance department.  Sometimes you have 2 of the 3, sometimes just 1.  So how do you prioritize the items or issues that will have the biggest impact on your facility?  There is a simple, yet vital principle that can be used in your facility to determine which issues to focus on.  This principle started in a garden in Italy while studying peas…  This principle […]

By |2019-04-19T15:49:34-04:00June 19th, 2017|Basic Root Cause Analysis, Continuous Improvement, Defect Elimination|Comments Off on Focus on the Important Issues, Not the Many Issues

What is Prescriptive Maintenance?

Understanding What Comes After Predictive Maintenance

Imagine being able to adjust your maintenance actions on the fly to provide the exact maintenance where and when it is needed.  However, you are not reacting to significant changes in the condition of the equipment (like PdM), but instead, you are taking many sources of information in real-time from the equipment using Internet of Things (IoT) and using analytics to analyze and understand the condition of the equipment.  This allows for a flexible maintenance strategy in which maintenance is only applied when and where it […]

Taking a Lean Approach to PM Optimization

How You Have Your PMs Addressing The Right Issues, Make The Effective

In the previous articles, we looked at what type of analysis to use to evaluate the effectiveness of the PMs and if they are cost effective. Once the PMs have been optimized to ensure they are addressing the right failure modes, then they need to be made efficient. Below is an excerpt from a recent article in SMRP’s Solutions Magazine on how to make PM efficient using the lean tools.

PM Optimization is often thought of as an […]

By |2019-04-19T15:49:36-04:00May 15th, 2017|Continuous Improvement, Defect Elimination, Review RCM, Standard Work, Teamwork|Comments Off on Taking a Lean Approach to PM Optimization

Linking Failure Codes To A Proactive Maintenance Strategy

Using Failure Data to Drive Sustainable Improvements

If you are lucky enough to have good failure data history in your CMMS, you are one of the few.  But even if you have the data, can you use it to make a difference to your organization?  Obviously, the data can be used to perform certain reliability engineering analyses, but what can those without reliability engineering experience do with the data?

Bad Actor / Pareto Analysis

Two simple analysis that anyone can use with their failure history are;

  • A Bad Actor analysis is identifying equipment that is […]
By |2019-04-19T15:49:38-04:00April 24th, 2017|CMMS, Continuous Improvement, Defect Elimination, Equipment Strategy, FRACAS, Reliability Engineering|Comments Off on Linking Failure Codes To A Proactive Maintenance Strategy

Optimizing Your Storeroom

Using a Kaizen Approach to Improve Your Storeroom

game plan game plan

No storeroom is perfect, well at least of those I have seen.  The process of improving is never ending.  A common term for this process of continuous improvement is Kaizen.   The Kaizen activity is often seen on the plant floor, either the form of a blitz, in which a tremendous amount of resources are thrown at an issue or an area.  The other is a systematic approach, in which a small amount of improvement is achieved each day.

These same approaches can be […]